When she was a child, Sara had been sure that the apartment would one day be hers. Doña Sara was old, her husband was even older, and there was no other child on the scene. Children ended up inheriting the house they’d grown up in, it had always been so, it was the logical, reasonable, and natural thing. Amparito and her brothers, who lived in Oviedo, would sometimes come to stay for a few days at Christmas, or at Easter, but her godmother always treated them as visitors, outsiders, strangers passing through Madrid. But then afterwards, when it all ended, Sara realized that the López Ruiz children, those “cousins” of hers, would be the only happy heirs of their aunt’s fortune. Reality, ugly and harsh, lurking on street corners around the Puerta del Sol, sank its teeth into her once more. Sara never, not even after she went back to live at the CalleVelázquez and saw how much her godmother still despised the fatuous, conceited Amparito, had any doubt as to the future heirs of theVillamarín fortune, the immense wealth whose control now lay in her modest but capable hands. Her godmother’s promises, far from dispelling this conviction, only secured it more firmly.
“I think it’s best if we don’t mention any of this to Amparito, don’t you agree?” she said to Sara one day when they sat down together, at Sara’s instigation, to deal with financial matters. “I mean, she’s so stingy, and she’s always thinking about her wretched inheritance. If she finds out, we’ll never be rid of her. Anyway, now that you’re living with me again . . .” Doña Sara looked into her eyes with warmth, and a combination of gratitude and trust born of long-standing affection. “I’ll do what I have to do, dear.You won’t end up in the street, far from it, you can be sure of that.”
Sara blushed and could think of nothing to say. At the time, towards the end of 1987, she had no idea of the course her life would take soon afterwards. She’d always been an excellent worker, honest, conscientious, and responsible, and her commitment to managing her godmother’s assets had not had the slightest detrimental effect on the conditions of her job. Certainly it now took up more of her time, but she preferred her new role to the monotonous routine of lady’s companion, in which she had begun to feel she was wasting her talents. She’d never be able to leave Doña Sara. She’d go on supervising her exercises until the end, even though they were now producing increasingly insignificant results. When Doña Sara felt like going out, Sara still took her to the cinema and the theatre, and had tea with her and her friends in the afternoon. But when Sara had a more urgent meeting, she’d send her godmother out for her walk with one of the maids, and she often stayed in her study doing paperwork in the afternoon while Doña Sara watched television. Her godmother never complained, because she never felt neglected—quite the contrary. Just as Sara’s relationship with her parents had changed, so Doña Sara’s relationship with her god-daughter gently and easily became the exact opposite of what it had once been. Sara accepted full responsibility for the old lady’s fate, and realized that this new situation was better for her.
She was forty by then, but still too young to be living like an old lady herself.This was the main advantage of the change—it freed her from the feeling of lethargy, of becoming fossilized, that had overcome her sometimes in her spare moments as her life slowed down, her own pace slackening to keep time with an elderly and infirm woman.The new demands of the job made her feel young again, interrupted the stultifying routine, and gave her life momentum, restoring a familiar sense of satisfaction as she accomplished each task brilliantly. Her days gradually filled with small appointments, duties that varied depending on the time of year and the day of the week: visits to the banks, drawing up quarterly statements, meetings with the managers who ran Doña Sara’s country properties—farms in the province of Salamanca, a large estate in Toledo, two in Ciudad Real—working lunches with the solicitor, the agent, the stockbroker. These were occasions when she could do herself up, buy clothes, go to the hairdresser, put on make-up, even flirt with men who often ended up staring at her with a captivated smile before expressing their admiration for her ability, and who occasionally went a little further, risking a proposition that, more than occasionally, Sara decided to accept. None of these mild flirtations turned into anything serious, but she had to admit they were entertaining.
The only person who was unhappy with this new turn of events was Amparito.Although she hadn’t been informed of the legal arrangements that had turned Sara into her main rival, she sensed that there had been a change that was detrimental to her interests, and she responded by increasing the frequency and length of her visits to her godmother. Doña Sara complained constantly of how tiresome Amparito had become and the visits bothered Sara too, until she found a solution in a dry, withering reply that guaranteed a lasting, if tense, truce between the two of them.
“Look, Amparito, to me this is a job like any other,” she told her the umpteenth time that Doña Sara’s niece wondered aloud what Sara might be taking from the house. “Move in here if you want, and take care of your aunt yourself.You only have to say the word and I’ll pack my bags right now and go back to my flat.You decide—whatever suits you better. But as long as I’m living here, there’ll be no more of your stupid allegations.”
And she meant it. She was an excellent worker, honest, conscientious, responsible, with hands as clean as her conscience. But none of what occurred subsequently could have happened had Sara Gómez Morales—self-sacrificing, disinherited, poor but admirably capable of taking care of herself and anyone else—not completed the final stages of a metamorphosis that returned her to all she’d been taught before she left that house, together with everything she had learned outside its privileged walls. Difficult lives produce difficult adults, and Sara knew the price of things only too well. Sara Gómez Morales had been nothing, but now she was prepared to be everything all at once.All she needed was an opportunity. And life came to meet her after the last frost of 1988.
When a maid rushed in and told her to hurry to the living room in the faltering, urgent tone of true emergencies, she feared that her godmother had had a fall, hurt herself, or had a serious accident. Instead she found her sitting on the sofa, holding the phone, weeping, shaking her head and saying repeatedly, “What are we going to do, dear God, what are we going to do?” Sara gently took the receiver from her and heard on the other end of the line the voice of Victoriano, the gardener at the house in Cercedilla, who’d been taking care of everything since the housekeepers died a few months apart, in the same year as their master. This was how Sara found out that the roof of the house, a country mansion that the grandfather of Doña Sara’s godmother had built in the first half of the nineteenth century to use as a hunting lodge, had collapsed spectacularly, taking with it the attics and the floor of a good part of the second story.
“Don’t worry, Mami,” said Sara, sitting beside her godmother and trying to comfort her once she’d hung up.“I’ll go and take a look at it this afternoon. I’ve agreed to meet Victoriano there at five. I’m sure something can be done.”
Sara had happy, luminous memories of the huge house surrounded by ancient pinewoods as far as the eye could see, its large gardens, swimming pool and tennis court; she’d spent the best summers of her life there. But she hardly recognized the wondrous paradise of her childhood memories in the abandoned ruin, standing there humiliated and forgotten. It had been over fifteen years since anyone last lived there, over fifteen years since anyone had turned on a tap, switched on the lights or the boiler or the cooker.Victoriano, who was very old and stooped, had done little more than occasionally prune the hedges closest to the main building, and had ignored the rest of the garden.The paths had disappeared, the rose bushes had died, and weeds thrived between the dirty, sparse remains of the gravel.
“I don’t know what to say, Mami,” she confessed to her godmother when she arrived back in Madrid, just in time for dinner.“It’s a complete ruin. It’s not just the roof that needs repairing.The staircase is so rotten it’s dangerous, the plumbing doesn’t work, and as for the electrics .
. . it’s still the old wiring that’s covered with cloth, and that has split in so many places it will mean one short-circuit after another. Everything needs attention, even the garden. It will cost you a fortune, but I don’t think you have any choice.”
Doña Sara closed her eyes despondently before opting for the easiest solution:
“What if I sell it?”
“As it is now?” asked Sara. Doña Sara nodded.“You wouldn’t just be selling at a loss: you’d be giving it away. I thought about it on the way home—you know I find it easy to think while I’m driving.” She paused and tried to sound more gentle, because she could see her godmother was upset and she knew that what she was about to say would upset her even more. “Look, first of all, I don’t think anyone is going to pay you what that house is really worth. People don’t tend to have such incredibly large houses any more. Particularly in a place like Cercedilla. But if you are going to sell it—which is what I think you should do, because you know what the weather’s like in the mountains and if you don’t live in it once you’ve done it up, you’ll be back in the same position in ten years’ time—you’ve got to sell it as a grand old mansion, not a ruin.With this sort of project, you’ll always get the money you spend on building work back, no matter how long it takes, and however much it all costs. If you do the house up, it gives you the chance to find some impulsive millionaire who’ll pay you a reasonable sum for it. If you sell it as it is, it’ll be the millionaire who gets a bargain, because after paying you a pittance, he’ll have the work done himself and end up with an incredible house that’s worth double what he paid for it.”
She was an excellent worker, honest, conscientious, responsible. She proved it yet again by hiring a builder, supervising the work, redesigning the bathrooms, choosing colors for the walls, thoroughly checking the quality of the finished work, dealing with an estate agent who failed to find a buyer after several months, changing to another agent but with no greater success, taking over the task of advertising the sale and showing people round herself in the winter of 1989. She had better luck than the agents.At the beginning of May, a predictably mismatched couple—he a white-haired, pomaded old man wearing a cashmere scarf, she a bimbo in her twenties who could have been his granddaughter—fell in love with the house before even seeing the inside. The woman announced that her name was Letizia, spelt with a “z,” talked nineteen to the dozen, and was crazy about nature, the environment and all that, as she told Sara several times. He had to hold his knees as he climbed the stairs but seemed prepared to sacrifice his remaining strength exclusively to the future glory of his young squeeze, and was constantly touching her breasts and smiling as he admitted that he could never say no to her. They tried to beat Sara down on the price, but she remained firm, and eventually they agreed an acceptable sum of ninety million pesetas, with all expenses to be paid by the purchaser. Her godmother, who’d just persuaded her doctor to increase her medication, was very pleased because it meant she’d be able to go to the seaside on the date planned, but she didn’t seemed particularly interested in the actual deal.“With things the way they are,” she pronounced, “selling the house just means one less problem to think about.” Sara could understand her point of view.
But the sale was delayed. For one reason or another, clinging to legal technicalities and the slowness of the banks, the buyers drew the whole thing out for over a month. Sara was convinced they were going to pull out of the deal, when Letizia with a “z” rang her to give her the name of their notary and the date on which the sale was to be completed. At the end of the conversation, in a different, slightly embarrassed voice, she added: “Bring a couple of bags, or a travel bag, something like that, because, well, I don’t think we’ve mentioned this before but if you don’t mind, we’d like to register the sale at seventy-eight million and pay the rest in cash.”
“In cash?” repeated Sara, smiling at her embarrassment.
“Yes. Maybe I should have mentioned this before, but talking about money is always so unpleasant.”
“Of course.” Sara smiled again, working out that this amount of undeclared money was acceptable because she’d easily be able to hide it from the taxman.“All right, we can register it at seventy-eight.Whatever suits you.”
She was an excellent worker. Honest. Conscientious. Responsible. And she was used to counting money.The twelve million pesetas in bank notes that changed hands in the notary’s office when he stepped out for a moment—deliberately—slid from her hands into the two small bags she’d brought for the purpose. But she hadn’t foreseen what would happen next.The weight of the notes.Their value.Their significance.
Back out on the Calle Núñez de Balboa, the palms of her hands felt strangely hot and tears pricked her eyes. She was losing her head, but it didn’t matter. She was more keenly aware of a shudder, an impure pleasure made up of anger and a desire for revenge that suddenly filled her mind, sharpening it to a point as deadly as a poisonous arrow, and making her heart beat faster. She was carrying twelve million pesetas that didn’t exist, twelve million that nobody had seen, that nobody would ever claim to have handed over, twelve million that the former owners would claim never to have had.Twelve million pesetas that existed only in the weight she could feel in each hand. In each of her two hands, the hands of a lost little girl who’d never had a home to return to.
Her godmother’s house was nearby, but on reaching the corner of the Calle Ayala, Sara turned left instead of right, going up the hill instead of down. She got to the Calle Principe deVergara and went on, holding on tightly to the two bags, a gentle flame in her heart, “money’s always so unpleasant,” but it kept her rooted to the ground, and made her feel more alert, kept her warm. Money could be so pleasant, it just had to mean more than the money itself. Sara Gómez Morales walked along, striding purposefully, an unfamiliar energy propelling her, going round the block once, twice, three times. Her mind was going crazy with a wild sequence of calculations: twelve million pesetas, how long would an accountant at the supermarket in El Pinar take to assemble that much money, twelve million pesetas, how many years would it take Doña Sara Villamarín to die for her god-daughter to have been able to save that much, twelve million pesetas, how many nice things, often expensive, sometimes very expensive things could a person buy with that much money?
Sara felt a shudder, a pressure across her chest like a full cartridge belt, a savage brightness, the certainty that the justice of rifles could be achieved beyond the humiliated land of her dreams.
Sara couldn’t stop thinking about the visit from the policeman from Madrid, not even when she found out Juan Olmedo’s other secret. So when she saw the development’s security guard at her front door, she felt sure the man must have come back.The guard had knocked so frantically and rung the bell so insistently that, as she went to open the door, she’d thought it must be the children, come to drag her off on one of their expeditions—after all, they had only ten days of holiday left. But it was Jesús, the security guard, and something was wrong, very wrong, because he was panting like a cornered animal and sweat was pouring down his face even though it was a cool afternoon and the west wind was blowing.
“Come with me, please!” His eyes were open very wide, and his lips were trembling as if he were about to cry.“Please, hurry, come with me!”
Sara was so alarmed that she didn’t even stop to lock the door.As she left the house, the security guard started running and she hurried after him as quickly as she could, but it obviously wasn’t fast enough for him.
“Run!” he shouted, turning his head as he ran.“Please! Run!”
She started running, feeling a little ridiculous because she was so unfit, but she kept going.As she reached the entrance of the development, her smoker’s lungs started to scream and the muscles in her legs protested loudly. She was coughing and spluttering, but she kept on going.Then she saw that the guard had stopped a few yards from the gate beside a red shape that was lying on the pavement. She stopped to catch her b
reath a moment, before realizing what that color meant. When she did, she started running again, but this time all her tiredness had disappeared. She felt terribly cold, panicky, but above all very scared.
Maribel was lying on the ground, on her side, curled up in a fetal position. She was wearing the same dress she’d had on when Sara spotted her with Juan in Sanlúcar.The blood rushing from her side formed a red puddle with wavy edges, like a monstrous carnation.
Sara screamed Maribel’s name and, crouching down, placed her hand on her forehead. She kissed her face, then took her hand and met her bloodless, exhausted gaze, unable to comprehend what she was seeing, what was happening, unable to take a decision or even wonder what she could do, how she could help, while the security guard shifted his weight from one leg to the other, as if he too were at a loss as to what to do. He managed to string a few words together.
“A woman at the bus stop came to tell me . . . She must have come out from behind that hut over there.The woman saw her, and came running to get me. When I got here, I found her lying on the pavement. She must have crossed the road—God knows how—you can see the trail of blood.”
The Wind From the East Page 46